> You're claiming that Australians are less likely to see stage IV cancer than Americans due to a worse healthcare system in America
I'm claiming that Australian citizens are more likely to bring cancer to their provider when it's still at stage 1, because the citizens do not risk bankruptcy when seeking diagnosis and treatment, resulting in treatment of cancers beginning prior to their reaching stage 4.
This would, if true, create a scenario where:
In Australia, the few stage 4 cancers seen are the cancers that failed treatment at stage 1, stage 2, and stage 3; they are extremely likely to be fatal, as they've already failed essentially every treatment available.
But in United States, the stage 1-2-3 "this is treatable" filtering out isn't occurring, because patients with cancer are waiting for age 65 to seek diagnosis, and so our stage 4 treatment success rate is higher because we didn't treat the treatable cancers earlier in the stages.
Do the above comparisons of AU vs US 'stage 4 survival rates' take into account the successful treatments at stages 1-3 that would presumably be occurring in AU? Do they take into account the incidences of 'this would have been treatable if diagnosed in stages 1-3' that are presumably occuring in US?
EDIT: Do they hold true for each individual type of cancer? Do they hold true when normalized for spending on a given type of cancer as a percentage of all cancer spending?
I'm aware that these are not easy things to compare or assess, and I understand that it's preferable to some to make no statement at all rather than make an approximation that doesn't hold up to a full-power statistical analysis. If someone does know of such a thesis, I suppose my most compact question would be:
"For each type of cancer: Does the Australian health care system tend to diagnose earlier than the United States health care system, provide care at a higher or lower total cost of treatment, with a higher or lower rate of success?"